Theoretically,
it would be possible to begin an interest in visiting
churches by becoming friends with people already doing
it. In practice, of course, this must hardly ever happen,
and churchcrawling is in any case a naturally solitary
activity. Perhaps it wasn't until the arrival of the
internet that churchcrawlers realised quite how many
others of them there were out there.

It was about
six months after I started the Suffolk Churches Site in 1999 that I discovered the churchcrawling
yahoogroup, an
internet mailing list where people could exchange
recommendations, experiences, theories, questions and
ideas. With hindsight, I am not sure I could have seen
the site through its 650 entries without the support of
the list, not least because it was often critical and
inquisitive. I got to meet a few members over the years,
some of whom became good friends, and in 2003 a party of
a dozen or so list members met up for a crawl of eight
churches in the Swaffham area of Norfolk. At the time, I
had no plans for a Norfolk Churches site - if I had have
had, I would probably have taken more photos - but these,
in any case, will turn out to be the oldest photographs
on the site, because although I had visited other Norfolk
churches previously, it was not with a camera of any
quality.

And with
these giants around Swaffham, too, I was in a minority in
that my camera was still a point-and-shoot affair which I
have since replaced by going digital. And so, because the
photos were not as important to me then, it was good to
chat, and to listen and to learn from people generally
much more knowledgable than I was. If they knew I was
going to take everything they said and publish it
entirely uncredited, perhaps they would have kept quiet.
Only joking, lads.